The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (Necon Classic Horror) Read online

  “You haven’t,” she said truthfully.

  He nodded, greeted loudly a mailman leaving the corner post office, and took her arm again to take her across Centre Street. As she glanced down the only business street in Oxrun, Natalie closed her eyes briefly and squeezed his hand between her arm and side. Had Sam been the one to give her the news, it was possible she would have succumbed to the roiling her nerves were threatening, but Marc’s firm grip and the comforting drone of his rambling voice had an effect she hadn’t expected. It was odd, and she wondered if perhaps she wasn’t reading too many of the library’s romances lately.

  “For crying out loud,” he muttered suddenly and stared at the traffic. “There goes Dederson down to the police station. That means I’ll have to watch the shop.” He grinned. “Now I won’t be able to paw you behind the stacks.” He released her arm, leaned slightly toward her before nodding brusquely and whirling to run back toward his office.

  Well, I’ll be ... Natalie thought as she watched him. I think the dope was going to kiss me.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  The library still seemed spring-new after four New England years. A red-brick rectangle, it was fronted by two-story arcs of polarized glass weekly washed and giving it a distinctly church like appearance. Surrounding the building were three narrow concentric aprons of white concrete that served as footpaths between wire-braced saplings of birch and willow. Four large squares of lush grass still a summer green stretched from the steps to the sidewalk and were bordered by redwood benches, today occupied by several elderly men bundled in grey and brown and playing checkers. Natalie had never understood why they didn’t prefer the municipal park that began only one block further on, but she liked to believe it was the stimulation of proximity to her books. Soon enough, however, the weather would add an uncomfortable dampness to its autumn bite and like aged birds too weary for migration, the men would retreat inside to one of the reading rooms off the main lobby where the warmth more often than not would put them quickly to sleep until closing.

  She nodded to several of the regulars, and they smiled back at her absently, tolerantly. Then she turned her back to the morning wind and watched Marc hurrying out of sight. There was a momentary temptation to call out, to make him return, but sudden warning shouts of a trio of bike riders broke her resolve. Regretfully, she went inside.

  With vaulted ceiling and yard-long cylinders of light suspended by gold-and black chains, the main floor was cavernous and bright, though its patrons’ voices automatically hushed upon entering as though in the presence of an ancient cathedral. Natalie scanned the area immediately before her as she slipped out of her coat, surprised that there were already a handful of people back in the stacks and several more scattered at the round tables that were oaken islands on the pale blue carpeting. To her left, the walls were colored with shelves of current fiction, to the right the yellow, red, green cheer of the fairy-tale mobiles suspended over the children’s section. Directly ahead was a formidable horseshoe desk which she avoided carefully as she drifted toward the aluminum steps that led up to the gallery and the library’s offices. A man whispered a hello and she whispered back, smiling. A boy not more than ten scurried around her with an armful of books, plopping them noisily on the counter of the desk and hopping impatiently as a middle aged clerk took her time checking them out.

  Natalie almost changed direction to goad some speed into the woman, but the frantic waving of a girl ten years her junior distracted her. She waited, then took the first steps up as the girl stepped into her shadow.

  “I’ve put the mail on your desk, Mrs. Windsor,” Miriam Burke said breathlessly, “and Chief Windsor has called twice already — boy, does he ever sound ticked off!— and did you hear about the guy that was killed in the park last night? Gory. I wish I could have seen him. He was from the college, you know, but I never met him. Mrs. Hall called, too, to remind you about Monday’s staff meeting — do you know who’s going to get the ax this time? And do you think it would be okay if I left early today? I know I promised to stay with you, but there’s this guy I met who wants to take me to this really super party tonight and I have to — ”

  “Stop!”

  Natalie leaned against the metal railing that curved with the steps toward the center of the gallery. She shifted her coat to her other arm and smiled down at the girl. Miriam’s sweaters and summer blouses, and the long ebon hair parted in the center were instant and sometimes disconcerting refutations of the sexless librarian image prevalent in most small towns; and though her New York City accent grated at times, her infectious ebullience was something neither Natalie nor the autocratic Mrs. Hall would have traded for a dozen more efficient workers. And Miriam was the closest thing to a friend Natalie had at work.

  “Miriam,” she said lightly, “who in God’s name winds you up in the morning? Don’t you know it’s Saturday and people — normal people — are supposed to be asleep this hour of the morning? And will you quit calling me Mrs. Windsor! It makes me sound like an old maid.”

  Miriam gaped, blinked slowly and pushed a nervous hand through her hair. There was a confusion of apology and disorientation in her face, and Natalie, wanting to laugh, placed a hand on her shoulder instead.

  “Hey, relax, girl, will you? This isn’t big business, you know, or one of those gigantic corporations that are practically fascist in tolerating laxness. It’s only a library, for crying out loud. And sure you can leave early. Don’t worry about it.”

  “But what about Mrs. Hall?”

  “It’s Saturday, Miriam, remember? She’ll be hung over until Monday, at least.” Miriam tried a grin to show she understood, and Natalie turned her stare to the main floor. At the desk, Arlene Bains was flipping through the clumsily large pages of the Fine Book, scowling but failing to cower a tall boy in a football jersey standing decidedly unrepentant in front of her. Natalie shook her head. The tall, fog-haired woman was trying to emulate her husband, Simon, but her heart was never in it. If Miriam, Natalie thought, was the antithesis of the mythical spinster librarian, then Simon Bains was the archetypal miser who also happened to own a prosperous bank. Poor Arlene just wasn’t measuring up.

  “Look,” she said to Miriam, “if you get too serious about all this, you’re going to end up as sour as Arlene. God forbid.”

  And without waiting for a response, she hurried up to the gallery and into her office. There were three offices off the gallery itself. The largest was Mrs. Hall’s, strategically in the center. On the right was an office currently being used as a storeroom, and the smallest, on the left, was Natalie’s by default.

  It would have been little more than a fair-sized bedroom in an average house, and was now jammed with stacks of new unstamped books, magazines to be sampled for possible subscription, and several cartons recently arrived from a local church’s supply drive. It was, she thought as she waded through to her desk, more a physical challenge than an administrative one, and she knew it was the butt of several longstanding jokes among the staff. Most of the teasing was pleasant, though there were spots of bitterness from those who had been passed over for promotion when Natalie rapidly proved herself the most competent. The rancor had concerned her at first, but since Ben’s death, she had cared little for the dueling of provincial politicking and had always been nervously grateful when Adriana managed to replace her most persistent detractors with young trainees from the college.

  She didn’t know what she had done, though it had to have been inadvertent, to gain Mrs. Hall’s support, and the thought made her even more determined to help the woman out of a depression that had dogged her since the spring. The way things stood now, however, the Director would have no sympathy or understanding that didn’t come bottled in bond, warm, with a dash of soda.

  “Well,” she said to the posters on the wall, the windows back and side, “here we go again.”

  For several hours, then, she was busy with invoices, inventories, queries from patrons and employe
es. She took several minutes, but no more, to worry about the lack of a sufficient budget proposal for the approaching fiscal year. She skimmed magazines, ran downstairs in time to hear Miriam reading an Oz book to an entranced circle of children, returned in the wake of a snap from Arlene that she could use another assistant on the floor. There was thankfully no time to think, to consider what Marc had told her until well past noon when she asked Miriam to dash around the corner to the Centre Street Luncheonette and fetch her back a hamburger, salad and malted.

  And while she waited, a call from the desk brought her down to the main floor. A middle-aged woman in a lamb’s wool coat was standing impatiently in front of Arlene, whose eyes were rolled to the ceiling in search of guidance. Natalie smiled immediately, professionally, when the woman snapped her glare around.

  “You’re Mrs. Windsor?” The voice was nasal and reed brittle.

  Natalie nodded.

  “Well , I must say, you certainly don’t run an efficient library around here.”

  “What’s the trouble, Arlene?” she said, ignoring the woman as politely as possible.

  “She wants something by Bishop Sheen. There are four books in the catalogue but ... “ and she waved a hand to the card file. “None of them are out, and I keep trying to tell her they’re missing, I guess, but — ”

  “But nothing,” the woman said angrily. “I put in my reserve for that book over a month ago.”

  “But, madam,” Natalie said, “if they’re missing, there’s nothing we can do but reorder them. Have you tried the county library?”

  “All that far?” The woman was incredulous. “You must be joking. I haven’t got that kind of time. I think I shall have to speak to Mrs. Hall about this.” She headed for the stairs, stopped when she saw the closed door above her and made a smart about-face to the exit. Natalie watched her, shook her head sympathetically at Arlene and returned to her office. Four books. By Bishop Fulton Sheen. But she had no time to wonder when Miriam returned with lunch.

  “How do you do that?” Miriam asked as she watched Natalie gulp at a malted.

  Natalie raised her eyebrows.

  “I mean, how can you eat that stuff all the time and still stay so thin?” Natalie grinned around her straw, peeked at the slight curves under her blouse and at her waist, then up to the more rounded figure Miriam swore was 90 per cent fat. She leered, Miriam laughed, and the room was silent again.

  A break, she told herself as she finished the last of the burger, and stood quietly at the side window looking out at the park across the street. The trees were still bright in their dying, the grass a deceptive green. Over the piked top of the black iron fence she could see riders through the shrubbery cantering their horses along the bridle path, women pushing baby carriages and gossiping as though their children didn’t exist. A lonely kite of orange and white punched through the foliage and strained to carry its rag tail to the horizon. Moving to one side, she pressed a cheek against the cool window and saw a patrolman station himself opposite the High Street entrance. He knelt to speak with a little girl and her doll, waved a group of teen-aged boys away from the flow of pedestrian traffic that Natalie thought would be making detours to see the scene of the recent crime. He stretched, then, and walked over to the curb where he accepted a cup of obviously hot liquid from the driver of a patrol car that idled at the crosswalk.

  When the telephone interrupted her, she jumped and thought of Sam.

  Swore silently when she recognized his voice.

  “Nattie, why the hell haven’t you called me? It’s been over a week.”

  She grinned maliciously at a poster of Big Ben on the unpainted wall. “I’ve been busy today, Sam. I’m sorry, really I am.”

  “All right.” The voice was deep, well suited to the man’s size. “I, uh, just wanted to tell you, see, that we — ”

  “Don’t bother, Sam. I’ve already spoken with Marc Clayton down at the Herald. He read me the fact sheet you put out. Is that why you’ve got me tailed again?”

  “Tailed?”

  She was annoyed, and suddenly impatient. “Come on, Sam, I’m too busy and too tired to play your manly games. You’ve got a patrol on me again, and I don’t like it. It’s invasion of privacy, or something like that.”

  “Nattie, it’s protection and you know it.”

  “Protection?” She coughed loudly to keep her voice from breaking too high. “Protection from what? I’m not the one who’s dead, Sam.” And immediately she said it, she bit her lower lip. “ Sam? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. It was uncalled for.”

  “It’s okay,” but it didn’t sound that way to her. “I just don’t want you hurt, that’s all.”

  “Sam, I appreciate the thought, really I do. But I’m not about to have another go around with you. Ben’s been dead over a year and a half, and there’s nothing to connect me with that poor man’s murder this morning. I don’t know him. I never met him in my life. There is no reason a t all that I can see for this new so-called protection.”

  “Hey, what do you mean, so-called?”

  “Just what I said, Sam. It isn’t protection until I need it, and I’ve just said I don’t. I’m old enough to take care of myself. And,” she said louder, sensing he was about to interrupt, “it’s ruining my social life.”

  “What social life ?”

  She bridled at the sneer behind the words and began wrapping the phone cord around her wrist. “That’s exactly what I mean, Sam. I haven’t got one because who wants to go out with a woman whose shadow wears a badge?”

  There was a silence through which she could hear the squad room’s phones, a woman’s voice pitched in righteous anger. Out of his private office and down with the boys, she thought. There was ribald laughter, and the woman began shouting.

  “All right, Nat,” he finally said. “You’ve made your point. I’ll pull it off right away.”

  “Great,” she said. “And if I get killed, it’ll be my own fault and I’ll apologize.”

  “That wasn’t funny, Nat. Ben was my brother.”

  “No kidding, Sam. You could have fooled me.”

  Quickly she yanked the receiver away from her ear before the sharp crack of disconnection could deafen her. Then she sat and wondered what had gotten into her. She certainly could have been more reasonable, less argumentative. But in speaking without preparation or thinking, she knew she had told Windsor what she’d been wanting to say for months and had never had the courage.

  Well, she told herself, it’s done and there’s no sense worrying about it, right?

  There was no answer. Miriam barged in, and the last rush began before the staff vanished on its weekend break.

  At five o’clock, an hour before leaving, she finally left her office and moved the paperwork remaining to the main desk. She disliked sitting alone when the others had left, more so now because of the images skirting her mind like cellar noises in a house after midnight. There were three lights burning at the back of the stacks, and one of the cylinders still glowed overhead. Outside she could see the street lamps hazed by the polarized glass, and the traffic’s headlights were disembodied and brief.

  The doors were locked. It was silent. With the thermostat dialed down, it was just this side of chilly.

  When she sat, the level of the counter was even with her shoulders, and she didn’t like the sensation of crawling out of a hole. It was then that she wished she had listened to Miriam, who had offered just before leaving to stay with her. Knowing the party was obviously something special, Natalie had demurred; she had also, she admitted, not wanted to have the girl prattle the sun down. For some reason she had decided her nearly three decades had not yet excluded her from the race of the young, and her efforts to play confidante were just as often comical as they were touching.

  In addition, there was the project, her own private delving into an anomaly she still wasn’t sure merited her time. From the locked drawer under a fold-down desk top, she pulled a series of distribution recor
ds, print-outs she’d ordered from the college computer hookup. Their length and bulk were too awkward to handle sitting down, so she reluctantly pushed back her chair and spread them out over the counter. It took several moments before her eyes adjusted to the simple computer coding, then she traced with her finger the usage frequency of each title in their inventory, marking several in red, underlining a score of others. Thirty minutes later the initial check was completed, and she took two steps back as though distance would sharpen her perception.

  “A pattern,” she muttered. “There must be some sort of pattern.”

  But the printout was too long, her notations too scattered, and she resigned herself, sighing, to an evening of typing. On the other hand, she thought as she pulled the typewriter drawer out and reset her chair, this could be a damned fool’s errand and I could better spend my time elsewhere.

  And where would that be? she wondered. At home, as usual, curled up on the sofa watching late movies, skimming the latest fiction, forcing her way through the newest reportorial exposes on government corruption. There were times, of course, when an intriguing promotional blitz for a new film lured her into the theater, but she seldom stayed for more than an hour, and only once during the past year had she seen a feature through to completion. There was a restlessness that gripped her in the flickering darkness, and the artificial lives being dissected on the screen seemed all too futile to bear watching. Comedies were worse than drama; the picture she’d watched to the end had been a French import without subtitles. She had stayed only to test her ability to guess the plot through gesture rather than words. When it had finished, she didn’t know whether she had won or lost.

  “Oh, shut up, Natalie!” she said, and leaned back in the chair.

  She could always call Marc and take him up on anyone of the several dozen rain checks she’d taken. Or even Karl Hampton, whose monthly telephone calls exhorted her constantly to whatever it was he called the finer things in life. Perhaps Wayne Gernard, a man who made her skin tighten whenever she saw him. Reporter, minister, professor. The cream of the crop, she thought, only the best of Oxrun society for little old me from . . .